Decision Makers Are Living In Strawberry

I don’t know what rock some letter writers have been living under lately, but according to their letters in a recent Roundup, they have no clue! Maybe they could show up at a PSWID meeting and find out the truth, rather than spreading the information apparently being fed to them by Bob Hardcastle’s Brooke Utilities, in another desperate attempt to divide the Pine/Strawberry communities.

In 2007, while Pine water users were paying 10s of thousands of dollars in dubious water hauling charges every month, that hauled water was being pumped up the Magnolia pipeline to Strawberry, to hide their water shortages at their cut-rate prices, which furthered the false notion that Strawberry has plenty of water. When I first came to Pine/Strawberry in 1992, Strawberry’s water issues were the same as Pine’s.

Both of these people allege that the “developers” in Pine want to steal Strawberry’s water. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The only “new” development in the area is the 33-lot last phase of Strawberry Creek Foothills in Strawberry that will further deplete Strawberry’s meager water supplies.

What are the “developers” going to develop in Pine? There are less than 100 acres of undeveloped private land left! The water is in Pine. The Milk Ranch well and Strawberry Hollow well have proved that there is a copious amount of water under Pine.

On the other hand, gambling $300,000 of the taxpayers’ money on the K2 well in Strawberry is a crap shoot at best, according to the hydrogeologists, once the full reports were discovered in sworn testimony at an ACC hearing, after the truth had been withheld by the four recalled former members of the PSWID board.

Strawberry’s shallow wells are marginal, and Strawberry only has about 200,000 gallons of storage, as opposed to almost 900,000 gallons in Pine.

Oh, by the way, four of the seven members of the current PSWID board, that are making these decisions, live in Strawberry!